Office 2.0, the excellent conference that’s put on by my friend and tireless productivity maven Ismael Ghalimi has just announced that David Allen, the thought leader who developed the “Getting Things Done” productivity strategy will be helping open the event with Ismael.  The official announcement is over at Ismael’s own IT Redux site as is more information about the conference which takes place from September 3 through the 5th.

If you’re planning on attending you might want to register today as it’s the last day to take advantage of the early bird registration rate which is $100 off the standard price.  You might also wish to make your hotel reservations.  The St Regis – which is one of the most beautiful conference venues in the city – is not a cheap place to stay and Ismael has managed to secure some pretty amazing discounts for attendees.  This hotel tends to fill up quickly, however, so I suggest that you book a room now or risk having the either pay a great deal more or stay somewhere less convenient if you wait too long.

I’ve attended the previous two Office 2.0 conferences (and even moderated panels at both) and I have to tell you that in addition to being one of the most innovative conferences around, it is also one of the most interesting, thought provoking and enjoyable.  Hope to see you there!

Also, don’t forget that David and the rest of the David Allen Company team are hard at work putting together their own event, the GTD Global Summit which is scheduled for 11-13th of March of 2009.  Registration is also open for this event – and it’s one for which you might want to register well in advance as it is sure to fill up with a rather limited number of slots available for attendees.

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A Community Contribution by Michael Gorsline

My experience is that GTD asks us to do a lot of of writing. It encourages us to write as we brainstorm, even on a cocktail napkin if necessary. It suggests we identify next actions in writing, and it even recommends we carry around something to capture thoughts and To Do ideas (next actions & projects) with everywhere we go. If we’re going to do all this writing it might be worth reflecting a moment on why it’s so worthwhile to do.

The Limit

There’s a reason we have blackboards in classrooms, white boards in conference rooms and why I will go to great lengths to make sure I have a white board in any consulting room where I do coaching or therapy. You’ve likely heard of the famous 7 plus or minus 2  chunks of information that we’re able to hold in working memory at any one time. Because of the upper-limit to our cognitive capacities, our speaking and auditory capabilities top out at roughly one thread at a time. That’s it. One. That one thread can move more or less quickly, but we can’t speak in several parallel threads at once. We also can’t listen accurately to several conversations at once. We can switch back and forth among them rapidly and catch the gist of them, but it is rapid switching rather than really doing more that one at a time. Our limited working memory also sets the boundaries of the complexity of thoughts that we can hold in mind. That is unless we cheat a bit. Here are two major ways we can cheat and feel good about it:

Parallel Processing

Here is where the writing comes in. Writing acts as extra-somatic memory—memory that resides outside the body. Let’s say I have a client that is trying to figure out what might be causing her child’s tantrums. So I ask her to tell me about a specific instance, which is where we usually start. As she tells me about the tantrum I begin sketching out a diagram of what she’s describing up on the whiteboard. It might start out with the phrase “Zoo Tantrum” in the middle, circled. As she cites possible contributing factors, several lines begin jutting out, each with a another phrase, such as “overstimulated”; “low on food”; “feeling jealous” about what his sibling ordered for lunch that he wished he’d ordered; and even reasons like the child having a “temperament” that makes him more prone to irritability in stressful circumstances.

With the diagram on the board, my client is able to shuttle back and forth from each of those ideas to represent all of them mentally, sometimes side by side, sometimes one after another, creating a sort of parallel processing—representing several ideas virtually at once. Or at least quickly enough that they can all be juggled in rapid succession to make comparisons that it would not be possible to make nearly as quickly if we were limited only to talking about those same ideas. My clients often find looking at a diagram of their problem so compelling that they jump out of their seat, needing no invitation, and start adding to the diagram. It is almost as if they can’t stay seated because the power of the ideas being generated is just too much to merely talk about. So writing things down has an effect that is a lot like adding a giant chunk of RAM to your computer, and very inexpensive RAM at that, which enables a powerful kind of parallel processing.

Freeing up RAM, by Using Your Hard Drive for Storage

The next piece is more widely known, but still well worth looking our attention. Our 3 x 5 notecard, the GTD Outlook plugin by Netcentrics, or the note we take on our phone, all function as extra-somatic memory in a another important way. This sort of memory is a bit more like computer storage, such as your hard drive on your PC, or the storage space on your mp3 player. David Allen has made the following metaphor a centerpiece of GTD: Offload information from your mental RAM so that it is freed up for other tasks like creativity and flexible thinking. That notepad or hipster PDA you’ve got in your purse is functioning as a hard drive. If you get the info out of your RAM and onto your hard drive, you don’t have to keep using up your valuable, much less available RAM space, your working memory, to keep the ideas represented. So if writing to enhance thinking was like artificially extending (remember we’re cheating here) your RAM capacity—how much brute RAM you have to work with; this storage idea is more like making sure not to clutter whatever capacity of RAM you have in the first place with information that could easily be kept somewhere else.

Well why can’t we just jot things down once we get home or just do so every once in a while? That is the brilliance of GTD’s admonition to practice “ubiquitous capture”, always having some way to record those thoughts immediately, by the bedside, in the car, at the grocery store. One of the first authors whose work I fell in love with used to practice exactly this skill of ubiquitous capture. John Steinbeck used to carry a small notepad with him everywhere he went, and furiously jotted down notes in all kinds of circumstances. He had even been known to interrupt a romantic interlude, yes, that’s what I mean, to jot down a thought or image that he didn’t want to lose. Now I don’t think you have to make ubiquitous capture quite that ubiquitous, but the sheer dedication that Steinbeck had to capturing valuable thoughts, I think, makes a memorable example. I’m sure his lover at the time found it memorable too. This is also a reminder that being really smart doesn’t obviate having to write things down. Brilliant people like Steinbeck know the value of cheating, and it actually enabled his brilliance to flower as it did.

So all those little ideas that you’ve got zipping around like so many gnats add up and clog up your RAM. Of course the actual functioning of the brain is more complex than our RAM analogy. The miscellaneous To Dos and responsibilities aren’t just taking up RAM, they actually require using up additional cognitive resources, for instance executive function, which Oliver Starr previously posted about, to shift our attention around like a spotlight onto what we’re trying to keep track of. But for our purposes, offloading those ideas and images immediately leaves you with only the single idea, “check my ‘trusted system’” to keep track of, rather than the myriad details we would have buzzing around otherwise.

Finally it is worth giving a nod to how much writing has affected the lot of humankind. Most of the conveniences we have today would not be around if it weren’t for this special bit of extra-somatic memory, which science, much of art, and so many of our greatest achievements rest upon—and which we usually take for granted. And now that we’ve got access to this ability to cheat, not just with pen and ink, but with an array of digital devices as well; when we choose not to write it down, voice note it, etc we’re choosing to toss away a giant chunk of our exceedingly valuable RAM. So next time you do a little paper and pencil brainstorming, send yourself an email, or draw a diagram so you can understand something better; take a second to remember what those little tools are doing for you. That extra RAM is there for the taking. Grab extra RAM more often. It’s darn close to free.

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Even if I had everyone in my organization trained in GTD I couldn’t picture people at my office implementing it. Mainly because they didn’t have the tools ready and handy in front of them to actually collect and crank their personal widgets. So before I began the training process I went on a several months search to find the perfect set of tools to distribute to all the Senior Management of Vakil Housing.

What tools did everybody need?
Intray/In Basket: We needed An intray/in basket for collection. This was pretty simple to get.

A Personal Collection Pocket Collection tool:We designed a pretty neat one for ourselves. More details here.

Filing Cabinet: I was quite particular that the Filing Cabinet we purchase for everybody would be swivel distance away. We used the Mercury filing cabinet with regular Hanging Folders.

A Calendar or Diary: Some used their mobile phones to store appointments but for most we got them a regular 2007 or 2008 Diary.

List-Management Tool: Finally we needed a system/tool for everybody to manage their Project & Action Lists. This is where I got stuck.

The List Management Tool we needed had to fit the following criteria:
- It had to be portable. Since most of the attendees would be from our Engineering Division or Marketing, they are required to go out of office for work. Hence a Desktop based system (such as Outlook) or Web Based system (such as Remember The Milk) would not work.

- Cost-effective. Yes, it had to be cheap. We were rolling this out throughout the organization. So that knocked out most Digital systems such as Blackberrys, Palms and Windows Based PDAs. (However, subsequently we did hand over Blackberry devices to certain Senior staff members).

- Flexible enough to add/remove Categories: Unlike a Digital System (Blackberrys, Outlook etc.) there’s no really neat & tidy way to adjust categories/sections/contexts in paper based systems. Most notebooks with dividers like so many of these don’t have tabs. If they do, like this one, they are fixed. So, the problem is that if for a particular Context Say @Calls you may not have too many entries, but you are stuck with the 50 or 100 pages that are below that particular Divider because you can’t adjust it.

Finally once again after months of hunting, one of our own employees presented me what seemed like the perfect GTD Tool for us. The Solo 5 subject Notebook:

What made this perfect is:
It’s quite portable, Not as big as a Box File

The Dividers are removable! This is such a boon because if you run out of space in one section, you can replace the divider in another place of the notebook and start another section. Or if you know you won’t make too much use of a particular section, you can adjust it so that there are not too many pages beneath it.

They’re very well microperforated, so the pages tear out quite neatly.

The 5 Dividers Cover most of the Categories required by GTD:

We can add additional sections/categories for additional lists with the help of these 3M Post-it Flags

After discovering this Brilliant GTD Tool, we bought one for all those undergoing GTD Training at our office and we could finally begin our GTD training sessions. How did we go about the training so that almost all Senior Managers at Vakil Housing understand Project & Next Action thoroughly as well as Bring their Inboxes to zero almost everyday?  Stay Tuned for the next post in this Series.

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By Michael Gorsline – Community Contributor

As a Parent Coach and Family Therapist I spend a lot of time helping people everything from troubleshooting how to get kids to bed, to how to help dinner time go smoothly, to how to give an effective timeout when it is needed.  I also help with teaching principles about relationships. For instance, how to share control in areas where you don’t need it as parent so that when you really do need it, kids will be willing to follow your lead. I also help clients with common therapy related skills like developing a deeper understanding of themselves or learning some self-empathy skills. Parents get a lot out of these skills. These skills create profound changes in people’s lives, yet I discovered that there seems to be a ceiling that clients  bump up against,  limiting their growth as parents.

My supervisor in grad school, a very wise and seasoned psychologist, had a knack for capturing the essence of life and of therapy by dividing things into three “baskets”. Here was what became the most important of them to me:

We have Three Primary Tasks in Life. If we’re good at these three we are successful and happy. Here they are:

1) Get along

2) Get things done

3) Self-soothe (manage our emotions)

They sound really simple and straightforward, don’t they?  I find it amusing looking back that I had no idea as a graduate student that number two was the name of a program which was on the cusp of becoming huge and which I’d one day being blogging about.

A lot of what I did with parent coaching and family therapy boiled down to the first and the last, getting along, and self-soothing, as well as teaching kids to do those same two. Those are truly important.  And they are of course much more complex than they appear at first glance, otherwise we wouldn’t call them life tasks. What I’ve discovered over the years though is that when I do nothing but helping with getting along and self-soothing, many parents hit that ceiling I mentioned. That’s because helping them with getting things done was a gaping hole that I was missing.

Too many therapists focus exclusively, by the nature of their profession, on numbers 1 and 3. And they just expect that clients either do or do not know how to get things done. They just don’t really see getting things done-skills as a task they ought to help with. But much like there are parenting skills such as the art of sharing control that in retrospect look like just common sense, there are Getting Things Done skills that are the same. That’s how we know they’re powerful. They are effective, and once you know them and practice them you get an illusory “Hey I knew that all along” feeling. David Allen has a term for that. He calls it advanced common sense .  Social psychologists refer it as hindsight bias.

What I’ve found is that parents, and all my other clients, including kids struggling in school, benefit from learning the skills from number two basket, Getting Things Done. I’m glad to have stretched the therapy model a bit, as many other therapists are doing now, to incorporate coaching on Getting Things Done. Because I would sure hate to have missed the opportunity to see families push past that ceiling by offering practical, easy-to-use GTD skills for accomplishing life’s second, and too often, overlooked  task.

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Randy Pausch was a computer science professor at Carnegie-Mellon University whose “last lecture” brought him to international prominence for his courage, his compassion and his humanity while facing a terminal illness.  If you haven’t seen his now famous lecture it is well worth the hour you’ll invest.  There are lessons there for all of us regardless of our age, health, gender, race, or economic status.  His talk reaches across all boundaries and is an eloquent example where a man with little time left to live nevertheless reminds each one of us that we owe it to ourselves, our loved ones and the world not to take a single day for granted because you never know how many days you might have left.

Even though I  never met Randy, his death hits me particularly hard as I am still personally dealing with unexpectedly losing my closest friend, Marc Orchant, just a few months ago.  It seems to me that Randy and Marc had a lot in common – no doubt they would have been friends and who knows, perhaps they have become friends in another world.  It seems a sad truth that the best of us are always taken away far too soon.  My heart goes out to those that Randy left behind I am sure the void must be vast although I am sure that Randy’s wife and children must feel enormous pride at the way Randy chose to handle this incredibly painful hand of cards (as he put it) that he was dealt.  Randy, like Marc, will be missed.

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This morning I had a nice surprise in my email inbox when Evan Carmichael of EvanCarmichael.com wrote us a note to let us know that he’d just authored a post called the Top Ten GTDtimes Posts of 2008.  He runs through what he felt where the most informative and useful posts written for GTDtimes since we launched.  It’s a well thought out and nicely summarized list and I think it’s worth a visit to his site to check out what he’s recommending and why (his explanations are right on the money as far as I’m concerned).

If you are relatively new to GTDtimes, this might be a very good way for you to see some of the earlier posts that are most useful to readers.  Thanks Evan – we really appreciate the coverage!

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Well, I wanted to embed this file so you could see it from within GTDtimes, but unfortunately our version of Word Press won’t allow me to do that with this particular content.  Anyway, go here to check out David’s most recent video-taped interview.

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David recently spoke with Dr. Relly Nadler on Voice America Leadership Development News.  Here’s a link to the streaming version of this very interesting show that includes a wide ranging discussion on GTD with David answering many questions on how to become more organized and productive.

If you’d prefer to download the show so that you can listen to it offline, that link is here.

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A Community Contribution by Arif and Ali Vakil

Have you ever had the feeling of being lost & left wondering “Why am I doing what I’m doing?”, “Why am I in this Job?”, “What does all this mean?”, “Who am I, and what is my purpose?”.  In spite of all the achievements there is a feeling of emptiness.  This feeling usually comes when our actions are not aligned with our Life’s purpose.

Using the Horizons of Focus model, GTD helped me align my day to day actions to my life’s purpose, and in this post I’d like to talk about how you can do the same.

What is GTD at 50,000 ft?

The Horizons of Focus Model is basically the agreements that one has with his or herself at different Horizons. Each Horizon represents a different time-level & impact.  It’s a tool to know what your work is so that your priorities are clear.

In David’s book 50,000 ft is defined as “This is the ‘big picture’ view. Why does your company exist? Why do you exist? The primary purpose for anything provides the core definition of what its ‘word’ really is. It is the ultimate job description.”

In other words, your agreements at 50,000 ft. are the description of your life’s purpose.

How to Find Your Life’s Purpose?

Sometimes I wish we were born with an instruction manual outlining our purpose, life would be so much easier, but then again life wouldn’t be so interesting if we had all the answers!  I like to define Life’s purpose in a two-fold manner. The first is one’s Inner Purpose, and the second is one’s Outer-Purpose.

[Read more →]

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Okay, if that headline leaves you scratching your head you are probably not alone.  After all, doing nothing hardly seems like a way to get anything done, however, it is my aim to convince you that at times, doing nothing is the most appropriate next action.

As you know if you’ve been reading GTDtimes with any regularity, I’m fairly new to practicing GTD and I make no claims of being an authority on the subject.  In fact, it’s a great privilege to be able to learn from so many knowledgeable and experienced GTD’ers as a direct benefit of editing this site.  Nevertheless, I believe that I can make a strong case for my statement above because my experience in another arena has proven to me that sometimes it is the choice to do nothing that leads to better results in everything down the road.

Back when I used to race bicycles for a living I had a problem finding people who wanted to train with me.  It wasn’t that I had no friends.  The problem, it seemed was that I rode too hard on my hard days and too easy on my easy days.  Most less experienced riders do exactly the opposite.  Their hard days are not intense enough and their easy days are too intense to deliver optimum recovery.  After more than two decades in the saddle, I had learned that having the discipline to take a day completely off and just do as little as possible was a key component in my training program.

Without taking the occasional day off your body never gets that chance to fully recover and recharge.  Your energy level never reaches maximum, you never get totally re-hydrated and in the long run, the twenty, thirty, forty or fifty miles that you put in while I was hanging out watching TV weren’t the miles that won you the race, they were the nails in your coffin as I rode away on fresher legs over the final climb.

Similarly, I believe that we all need a mental break from time to time so that we have the ability to focus completely, to make good decisions about what our most appropriate next action needs to be and so that we are capable of putting forth our best effort when and where it can do the most good.

In the geek culture in particular, there’s a sort of masochistic pride we seem to take in logging the most absurd hours, taking the fewest days off and forgoing meals and coffee breaks to prove we’re working harder than the next guy.  Frankly, if we were bike racers we’d be peeing off the bike on training rides instead of stopping like civilized people. (Yes, I know it sounds impossible, but it is actually something that a professional cyclist can do without wearing it – seriously) .

Peeing aside, the truth is that this sort of behavior leads to all sorts of problems.  As a double-divorcee myself I can attest to this being counter productive to relationships, but there are other costs that are equally steep.  Stupid mistakes like accidentally hitting the “send” button or misaddressing a scathing email, falling asleep in a crucial meeting or simply doing less than stellar work are all quite possible when you don’t factor some mental recovery into your productivity strategy.

Like an athlete who doesn’t realize that the body improves while recovering from the stress of training, not the training itself, an executive who works non-stop is cheating herself out of the mental recovery that can enable creative thinking, problem solving, or even simply relaxing enough to get a good night’s sleep.

People used to laugh at my training schedule when they’d see a day that said: Mileage Zero, Couch 9 hours – they figured it must be a joke until they saw me with the remote control a stack of videos and a big bowl of microwave popcorn – yet it made perfect sense to me to schedule my recovery with the same discipline with which I scheduled my other training.

The thing is I bet that not a single reader of this site has doing nothing as a next action anywhere on any list or scheduled on any calendar.  Of course doing nothing is a little bit hard to categorize as a next action.  Perhaps we should also add occasional inaction to our lists.  Who knows, you might just discover the same thing that I did during my  racing years: that sometimes a little bit of time spent doing nothing leads to accomplishing something much bigger down the road…

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